Herbert Marcuse quotes - page 5

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior. (Herbert Marcuse)
Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
There is no free society without silence, without the internal and external spaces of solitude in which the individual freedom can develop. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Preaching nonviolence on principle reproduces the existing institutionalized violence. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Self-determination, the autonomy of the individual, asserts itself in the right to race his automobile, to handle his power tools, to buy a gun, to communicate to mass audiences his opinion, no matter how ignorant, how aggressive, it may be. (Herbert Marcuse)
Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Glorification of the 'natural' is part of the ideology which protects an unnatural society in its struggle against liberation. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
The unification of opposites which characterizes the commercial and political style is one of the many ways in which discourse and communication make themselves immune against the expression of protest and refusal. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Contemporary industrial society is now characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity." View quote
Herbert Marcuse
That which is cannot be true. (Herbert Marcuse)
One can delineate the domain of philosophy however one likes, but in its search for truth, philosophy is always concerned with human existence. Authentic philosophizing refuses to remain at the stage of knowledge [...]. Care for human existence and its truth makes philosophy a 'practical science' in the deepest sense, and it also leads philosophy-and this is the crucial point-into the concrete distress of human existence. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
While it [tolerance] is more or less quietly and constitutionally withdrawn from the opposition, it is made compulsory behavior with respect to established policies. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Hypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest. View quote
Herbert Marcuse